Strange Powers (12 page)

So when I settled down to studying Mrs Beattie's manuscripts, I had no expectation of discovering profound revelations. And I didn't find any. But there
were
a great many keen insights, some of them exciting: 'When Roger Bannister ran the four-minute mile, he made it possible for all men to do it. Since that time, many have done so—the potential for this had always been there, but no one else had tried it; the time had not yet come. So it is with all things, in the way of evolution.' That struck me as way above the level of the eloquence and profundity of 'Francis Bacon'. It is an oddity that has been observed by writers on mountaineering. First a mountain is regarded as unclimbable; men die in the attempt. Then someone succeeds; and within a couple of decades, Sunday school teachers are taking parties of children up it.

On the other hand, there were misunderstandings. 'Ouspensky says: "The soul and the future life are one and the same." It is imperative to keep our souls, if we are to win eternal life... ' But Ouspensky was saying something much profounder than that. He meant that man is a fragmented creature with thousands of '/V, all replacing one another minute by minute. How can such a creature have a 'future'? His future is shared out between a thousand selves. In the same way, how can he be said to have a soul? He has a thousand fragments of soul, like a shattered mirror. So to achieve unity (a single 'self or soul) would also entail having a real future.

On the other hand, the spirit generally pervading the manuscript is close to that of Ramakrishna, the Hindu saint who went into a state of
samadhi
(ecstasy) at the mere mention of the name 'God' or 'Krishna'. 'Tell yourself that God is good, unchangeably good. That He exists in you, and that without Him you could not exist at all. Feel a desire to unite with Him, so that He may express Himself through you. Feel God as love.' The words are trite, but the overall impression is of a genuine, deep, strong religious impulse, not of someone repeating religious platitudes. There is a strong overall feeling of genuineness.' The insights are real: for example, the recognition that most human beings are hopelessly passive, failing to recognize that 'all power comes from within', and that 'we are weak only when we fail to recognize this'. This is, of course, the same basic recognition as in Robert Leftwich's book. And once I had noted this similarity, I noted many others: the insistence on the importance of discipline and responsibility, for example. She writes of the necessities for spiritual evolution: to lead an ordered life, to keep the body as fit as possible, and not to 'use it to excess', to accept obligations to family and society, and take up a profession according to our capacities. No outsider-ish 'opting out', no

'Do what you will, this world's a fiction And is made up of contradiction...'

Again, she agrees with Leftwich that it is necessary to 'retire' in order to be able to devote time to thinking and self-knowledge. 'Since retirement I live a secluded life, a kind of contemplative life. It would not be possible to live the normal everyday working life full-time and to be able to have this kind of inner-experience. This is not possible; which is why, I think, I was able to leave the body only before and after I had ceased to live a full emotional sex life and a full-time working life. All levels of consciousness, as well as the three bodies, have to be in alignment, in harmony, at rest, before real contemplative experience is possible.' Passages like this have a definite sense of authenticity.

Certain phrases—like the reference to the three bodies—puzzled me. When I asked Mrs Beattie about them, she would refer me back to the manuscript, saying they were explained there; but I couldn't see them, or the explanations were mixed up with other matters, which confused me. So the next time she came over for a weekend, I asked her to sit down and talk into a tape recorder, giving me details of her life, and an outline of her basic ideas.

Eunice Beattie was born in Bangor, North Wales, and grew up on a nearby farm—which had been in her family for generations. (I was surprised to realize she was Welsh—she has no trace of the accent.) It was interesting to realize she was a Celt. There was a tradition in her family (although she admits she is not sure whether there is any truth in it) that one member of each generation should become a hermit, and a kind of priest. The 'religion', as she described it, sounded like some curious survival of paganism; the family would go to some kind of stone circle near the farm, and perform a harvest festival type of ceremony that involved placing wheat, honey and water on a flat stone which served as an altar. (Note that the harvest festival, as known in English churches today, was introduced in the nineteenth century by the Rev. R. S. Hawker, the poet and smuggler of Morwenstow.) A prayer was offered in Welsh. And just before Christmas, the family decorated a cauldron, known as Ceridwen's cauldron, with holly. This sounds like the kind of semi-pagan survival described by Margaret Murray, although Mrs Beattie insists that it was a simple religious ceremony, nothing to do with witchcraft.

Her childhood was completely normal—attending school, working on the farm (with her brothers and sisters). She was always lonely, and regarded by the rest of the family as delicate, although she only suffered the usual childish illnesses. It was at sixteen that she had her first unusual experience. One night, just before dawn, she woke up and found herself standing beside her bed, and looking down on her body which lay in the bed. There was a man standing beside her—or rather a figure, whose body seemed to be an area of luminosity. She could only see his head, although this was not particularly clear. This 'man' she refers to as her teacher. He told her that he had brought her out of her body, and that he wanted to warn her that she would have a serious accident within two weeks. Precisely fourteen days later, the brakes on her bicycle failed and she was thrown into a brick wall; she spent several weeks in hospital. I wondered why her teacher couldn't simply have warned her to have her brakes looked at by the local repairman, but she went on a moment later to say that the accident, and the period in hospital, were essential to her evolution. This is an interesting point. Many 'psychics' have started their careers with an accident or serious illness. (In
The Occult
, I have cited the well-authenticated case of Peter Hurkos, who became psychic after receiving a serious head injury when he fell off a ladder; when he woke up in hospital, he found he could read people's thoughts and 'see' their future.)

Subsequently, she had many experiences of astral projection. At this point, she explained the puzzling business of the 'three bodies'. There is, apart from the physical body, an electromagnetic (or energy) body, and the 'astral' body (which she prefers to call the emotional or soul-body). The energy body would seem to be what Harold Burr measures with his voltmeters, and what the Kirlian device detects. The astral body is the body that travels—perhaps Robert Leftwich's superconscious. The energy body hovers above the physical body when it is unconscious—or anesthetized. Mrs Beattie said she had often seen this in the operating theatre. (The psychic Phoebe Payne, quoted in
The Occult
, was also able to see the 'auras' of flowers and animals. The inference would seem to be that people like Mrs Beattie and Phoebe Payne have a sense that can detect the 'energy body' like the Kirlian device.) The aura, in a healthy person, spreads out about a foot beyond the physical body, and it radiates various colors—depending on the consciousness of the individual. When the individual is tired, the aura dims.

She laid a gear deal of stress on this matter of vital energy. I found it interesting because I had recently been fascinated by an account of experiments carried out at McGill University, as described in Lyall Watson's important book
Supernature.
Barley seeds were treated with salt and baked in an oven—but not long enough to kill them. They were then planted, and some were treated with water which had been held for thirty minutes per day by a known 'healer'. The plants treated with this water gave appreciably better results than those treated with ordinary tap water. Moreover, when the water was 'treated' by a woman suffering from severe depression, and a man with psychotic tendencies, the growth of the seeds was notably retarded. These experiments by Bernard Grad, which seem to confirm the findings of Harold Burr, also fit the pattern of Mrs Beattie's own insights into the subject of vital energy. (Oddly enough, chemical analysis of the water treated by 'healers' revealed a slight spreading between the hydrogen and oxygen atoms.)

This led Mrs Beattie to make some comments on negative people and 'vampirism'—the way that some people can drain your energy, so you feel completely worn out after half an hour with them. It was phenomenon, she said, that she had often noted when working on old people's wards. They would get into a thoroughly negative state of mind, and drain the energy of anyone who worked on the ward. I asked her whether the negative attitude causes their sickness, or vice versa. I could guess what her answer would be, and I was right: that most sickness is caused by 'negativity', and begins with the energy body, which then affects the physical body. 'The mind affects the emotions, the emotions affect the energy, the energy affects the physical body.'

The effect of her accident at sixteen was to give her certain powers of insight, of the same type as Peter Hurkos'. She found that she often knew about people simply by looking at them, and found that by looking at their hands—or the tea leaves left in their cups—she was able to describe their lives and foretell the future. This was 'instinctive', she said—and it sounds, as she describes it, not unlike Robert Leftwich's description of dowsing. At a later stage, these powers diminished, although they never faded. She had no definite idea of what she wanted to do when she grew up—only that she didn't want to marry a farmer and settle down to existence as a housewife. When she thought about it, she was inclined to feel that she would become a nurse or a nun. But by the time she left school, her father had left the farm and moved to Knowsley, near Liverpool, where he took over a market garden on Lord Derby's estate. Eunice worked for her father—tending greenhouses, wrapping flowers. From the family's point of view, the change was a success; her father proved to be a good market gardener, and the business prospered. From Eunice's point of view, it was less satisfactory; after farm life in Wales, she found the English too practical and down to earth. It was lucky that she could work for her father. The out-of-the-body experiences continued to happen periodically, preceded by a feeling of introspection, a desire to 'sink into herself. She told no one of these experiences. She also decided, at a fairly early stage, that it was important to keep these experiences secret; she felt that this was essential if she was to live a normal life. At the age of 22%, she was ready to leave home; she wanted to get as far away as possible. So she answered an advertisement to become a nurse—a probationer—at a hospital at Kingston on Thames. At that time, hospital work was a vocation rather than a career. Pay was minimal; they had to work long hours, and buy their own uniforms. But it was about the only vocation—apart from a nunnery—that suited her temperament. The problem, as always, was simply amount of work involved; she would be so exhausted at the end of a day that there was no time for spiritual adventures.

As she described all this to me, I found myself forming a definite picture of what was involved, and realizing that, in a way, it was not so very different from my own teens and early twenties—or, for that matter, from anybody who has this romantic impulse to escape from the world. Thomas Mann's novel
Buddenbrooks
contains a classic portrait of the 'artist as a young man', and the chapter on Hanno's visits to the seaside—as a child—is particularly powerful: the sense of release, the peace, the delight, the freedom, of wide beaches, seaweed on the rocks, anemones in pools, hours of lying quietly on the sand, 'while you let your eyes rove idly and lose themselves in the green and blue infinity beyond. There was the air that swept in from that infinity—strong, free, wild, gently sighing and deliciously scented; it seemed to enfold you round, to veil your hearing and make you pleasantly giddy, and blessedly submerge all consciousness of time and space.' And I can recall, at fifteen or sixteen, spending evenings reading poetry in my bedroom,while all the tensions gradually relaxed out of the soul, until you felt tired, but completely serene and free, like someone who is convalescing from a dangerous illness. Thomas Mann felt that this capacity for total relaxation, the longing for 'dim hills and far horizons', makes one unfit for normal life; it is almost inevitable that Hanno should die young. Mrs Beattie always been made of stronger stuff; she has always been prepared to live a normal life and work for a living...

What I am now suggesting—with no certainty of being on the right track—is that the forces that were struggling to find an outlet in her were very much the same forces that produce all literature and art. They seek out whatever channels are available to them. Yeats' imagination turned to fairy lands and the world of the occult. A young Cornishman named Leslie Rowse—from a working-class background—managed to win a scholarship to Oxford, and became a historian, finding in the study of the past the same release that Yeats found his fairy lands. Einstein found the same release in the world of stars and atoms; Freud in the dark waters of the unconscious. But poets and artists and scientists have a path to follow; once they have seen it, all they have to do is stick to it. A girl brought up to feed chickens and tend flowers had no comparable outlet; the creative energies turned inwards. A Freudian would talk about 'compensations', even of sexual unfullfilment, and there I think he would be wrong. Mrs Beattie said wryly that she always thought of herself as an old maid; but she admitted that, as a teenager, and as a nurse, she had flirtations and occasionally went out with boys. She would be unlikely to meet anyone like herself in the hospital milieu; so the lack of interest in sex was basically a failure to find anyone who appealed to her as an ideal.